Seth Hoy: To date, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Washington permit qualifying undocumented students to pay the same tuition as their classmates at public colleges and universities.

Ellen Brown: The recent interest in state-owned banks has provoked challenges on grounds that they violate state constitutional prohibitions against lending the credit of the state. The argument is not valid.

Steve Hochstadt: The recent effort of Wisconsin Republicans to silence Professor Bill Cronon, historian at the University of Wisconsin, because he was critical of the legislation to remove collective bargaining rights from Wisconsin state employees, shows how easy it is for politicians to try to punish political speech they don’t like.

Lillian Taiz: We think the CSU’s top managers should get their priorities straight. We don’t have spare dollars for pet projects and unnecessary perks. They must demonstrate that they will spend every taxpayer dollar on providing students with a quality education.

Joseph Palermo: Yet it’s hard to believe that the American people this November are going to return the party to power that not too long ago lied the nation into war, doubled the national debt, and collapsed the economy.

Joseph Palermo: The Constitutional straight-jacket that keeps the state government in gridlock and voters in despair is the same institutional structure that brought the pathetically unqualified body builder into the governorship in the first place.

Joseph Palermo: Peter Baker’s profile of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the New York Times Magazine raises some interesting questions about President Barack Obama’s top aide. For Emanuel, it seems that all politics are electoral politics. He wouldn’t know a social movement if he saw one.

Joseph Palermo: he Republicans, who control the state’s finances through the “two-thirds rule,” tell us every day that in a $1.8 trillion economy we can’t do anything but cut, cut, cut because we simply “don’t have the money.” They tell us that a $19 billion budget deficit — about 1 percent of the state’s GDP — requires us to dismantle the higher education system, lay off teachers and social servants, close parks, and demolish public institutions that took a generation to build.

Joseph Palermo: Schwarzenegger’s hackneyed “State of the State” address was pathetic and unconvincing. If it weren’t for his acting chops and his ability to emote on cue, he couldn’t get away with the simplistic platitudes that roll off his tongue. Then again, if he couldn’t act he wouldn’t be governor either.

Throughout this period of unprecedented cuts to the CSU budget, the Chancellor and his administration have failed to confront elected leaders or even to educate the people of California about the costs of political choices made around the California budget.

Los Angeles

Cheryl Dorsey: Beck is leaving two years before completing his second term. I bet if you were to ask the parents of Ezell Ford—the unarmed 25-year-old black man killed by LAPD officers in 2014—they’d probably say that they wished Beck had left a lot sooner.

Economic Issues

RJ Eskow: If today’s resistance is to become a lasting movement, we must decide what we’re for. Otherwise, the Resistance will fail to motivate the 38 percent of Americans who didn’t vote in the last election.